Page Speed - Search Results

Understanding Page Load Time on the Ripe Platform

Page load time is crucial for user experience on the Ripe platform. Several factors influence it, including internet connection speed, device type, number of properties displayed, property connection types, selected date range, and date changes. Here, we'll explain these factors and how the Ripe platform optimizes performance to ensure fast, reliable results.

Internet Connection Speed

The speed and stability of a user's internet connection significantly affect how quickly a web page loads. Users with slower connections (e.g., rural areas or congested networks) may experience delays.

Device Type (Desktop vs. Mobile)

Mobile devices often have less processing power and different network conditions compared to desktops.

Unique Number of Properties

Generally speaking, the more properties, the longer the load time due to increased data retrieval on a per-property basis. However, once we are retrieving properties from a specific connection the additional time is not significant and shouldn't impact how many properties you want to show. The impact is often measured in milliseconds, and users want the most choice possible so it’s not advised to limit property count for page speed gains.

Type of Property Connection

One of the key benefits of Ripe is the ability to represent hotels, homes, condos and professionally managed properties all on a unified listing page. However, different properties use different connection types to request real-time availability and pricing. Connection types like Property Management Systems, Sabre, Track, Expedia, Streamline and others will each have various levels of performance and speed when returning results.

Selected Date Range

A broader date range can increase the amount of data required to check availability and pricing, slowing down the response time. This date range must then be used across every connection type, thus accumulating to a slower load time.

Date Change

Often once you get a list of results, then change the date range you will see faster results. This benefits from the browsers ability to cache or temporarily save static content like images and words, thus only fetching new availability and rates.

Ripe Platform

The Ripe platform is designed to be as fast as possible when requesting properties. The nature of our product is to call many 3rd party providers to return a single set of results you can’t find anywhere else, but this brings challenges. We implement asynchronous requests to multiple providers at once, server-side caching is used appropriately and we optimize the number of properties for each request. We are constantly working to improve the speed of request and page load.